America’s High-Class Spies
America had a monopoly of the so-called high-class spies, according to this authority. The average German spy was described as a man who has one or more convictions hanging over his head—an unsentenced criminal—and these men were paid only about $250 a month. The statement continues:
“‘The last spy we caught was only a day or so ago. We had been after him for some time and he was traveling with a perfectly good American passport.
“‘The high-class spies with you are responsible for the sabotage, for the strikes on the docks and in the factories. They are pacifists, anticonscriptionists. It is a situation terribly serious for you. They are going to delay what they can not prevent. Don’t flatter yourselves that the important spies have been driven out. If I had been a spy in America and the warning had been given to me so long in advance, I would have laid my lines very well. Look out for those lines; you may trip.
“‘What should be done with a spy in America? He should be shot as soon as his espionage has been proved. No weakness should be permitted because he has many affiliations there.
“‘I was in Germany eight years ago. Everywhere I was asked, “Are you ready to fight America?” That was the pretty little German game. Even then they were dying to rub into us the fact that America was our enemy. In the beginning, when the commercial party—Herr Ballin and his clique—were in power, they pretended a great affection for you. It was contrary to their desire that the submarine warfare became so terrible—not because they hated its brutalities, don’t make any mistake about that, but because they thought it a diplomatic blunder. Then and now they have a press which harps on the unfriendly feeling that exists between you and us. That often reiterated phrase that “America is fighting Great Britain’s battles for her” was made in Germany.
“‘I’m not such a fool as to think that America loved us in the past, but that she ever hated us as the Germans have said and that we have hated her as they still say in subtle, indefinable ways in some of your papers, is unbelievable by either of the parties concerned. Nations have faults as do individuals. We’ve made mistakes. We may have talked a little too much about the Shannon and Chesapeake and you too much about Bunker Hill and that tea-party in Boston Harbor. Let’s have an end to it—it all helps Germany too much. Take away the text-books from your children which teach them to hate us. If you try it, the German school-teachers will try to keep them, see if they don’t.
“‘America ought to love us now if she has not in the past, if national love is founded on respect, as it should be. We can point to ourselves with pride. We have given up in this war the thing we most believed in—personal freedom. We have made untold sacrifices and we are ready to give up everything—everything. Anything in your press that makes you see these facts in a distorted way is false, spy-work of the subtle, underground, submarine mentality sort that the Germans excel in.
“‘Look out for it. It isn’t the work of the “lovely lady spy” or that of the man with a conviction suspended while he does their dirty work that you are in danger from. It is just where I have pointed out.
“‘You asked me a while ago what England would do in case Germany won. I will tell you and you can draw from it the lesson of spy—and other German effort.
“‘If Germany should win, there won’t be any one here when it happens to know anything about it.’”